This program is part of Village Preservation’s Semiquincentennial series of programs celebrating our Revolutionary Village. The Revolutionary Village not only celebrates the founding of our country, but the exceptional role our neighborhoods played in its development and the realization of its ideals over the last 250 years and beyond.

Long before Hollywood, America’s celebrities flocked to the Union Square, Manhattan studio of Napoleon Sarony, the most famous photographer of the Gilded Age and a member of the Salmagundi Club. Oscar Wilde, Sarah Bernhardt, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and countless others sat for portraits that became the definitive images by which generations of Americans came to know them.

Drawing on her book, Napoleon Sarony’s Living Pictures: The Celebrity Photograph in Gilded Age New York, Dr. Erin Pauwels explores the remarkable career of this eccentric artist and entrepreneur whose theatrical approach to photography transformed portraiture into performance. Through lavish staging, carefully directed poses, and an instinctive understanding of public image, Sarony helped shape the modern celebrity portrait while influencing ideas about fame, artistic identity, branding, and copyright that continue to shape how public figures cultivate their images today.